“In virtually every community they serve, newspapers have the biggest newsrooms, the best-known brands and significant audience market share. Now they are building on those to find new ways to serve audiences and local businesses.”

The report, which covers US newspaper operations excluding international operations or non-media enterprises, found that $18.9 billion of revenue came from print advertising and $3.4 billion from digital advertising.

That’s in addition to another $10.4 billion from circulation, $3 billion from new revenue sources and $2.9 billion from advertising from direct marketing or non-daily publications.

Digital revenues — which include circulation, advertising, e-commerce, digital marketing and other sources — made up 11 percent of total revenue in 2012 for the 13 companies that provided this data, the NAA said.

The five percent overall growth in circulation revenue was the first gain in this category for the newspaper industry since 2003. These gains were from digital or bundled subscriptions, which offset a 14 percent drop in print-only circulation revenue.

A study last month by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism said newspapers “have started to experiment in a big way with a variety of new revenue streams and major organizational changes.”